This paper presents DraMachina, an authoring tool dedicated to authors of interactive fictions. An interactive fiction is an extension of classical narrative media as it supposes a direct implication of spectators during the story evolution. Writing such a story is much more complex than a classical one, and tools at the disposal of writers remain very limited compared to the evolution of techn...

Most readers of “Twenty-Five–Year Experience With the Björk-Shiley Convexoconcave Heart Valve: A Continuing Clinical Concern” in this issue of Circulation have not heard of the valve.1 Many elements of its story parallel those of cerivastatin2,3 and rofecoxib,4 but with a twist: Recalling a heart valve may entail greater risks than leaving a possible “time bomb” in place. The Björk-Shiley story...

We present a novel approach to documentary storytelling thatcelebrates electronic narrative as a process in which the author(s), anetworked presentation system, and the audience actively collaborate inthe co-construction of meaning. A spreadingactivation network is usedto select relevant story elements from a multimedia database anddynamically conjoin them into an appealing, coherent narrativep...

We propose a novel sensor system for monitoring the structural health of a building. The system optically measures the relative-story displacement during earthquakes for detecting any deformations of building elements. The sensor unit is composed of three position sensitive detectors (PSDs) and lenses capable of measuring the relative-story displacement precisely, even if the PSD unit was incli...

Media link events in society into meaningful plotlines for public consumption. For social issues such as homelessness this storytelling process continues until an issue is resolved or another concern takes precedence. This article investigates British Independent Television News1 (ITN) portrayals of homelessness from January 1993 to December 2002 (n = 99). News items are explored as instalments...

The paper accommodates Espen Aarseth’s concept of virtuality and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s concept of suspension of disbelief to the context of modern story forms. The primary focus will be on the videogame. The premise is that suspending disbelief at narrative improbabilities is a skill required to construct narrative coherence. Constructing narrative coherence of stories that contain virtual ...

Because today’s media centric students have adopted digital as their native form of communication, teachers are having increasingly difficult time motivating reluctant readers to read and write. Our research has shown these text-averse individuals can learn to understand the importance of reading and writing if the instruction is based on digital narratives. While these students are naturally a...

Five 8- to 10-year-old children with dysphonetic and dyseidetic dyslexia were given instruction in reading comprehension using a story grammar strategy in which story instruction was differentially designed to match the simultaneous or sequential mental processing strengths of each dyslexia subtype. A multiple baseline, single subject experimental design and statistical analyses indicated that ...

Emotional arousal has been demonstrated to enhance declarative memory (conscious recollection) in humans in both naturalistic and experimental studies. Here, we examined this effect in amnesia. Amnesic patients and controls viewed a slide presentation while listening to an accompanying emotionally arousing story. In both groups, recognition memory was enhanced for the emotionally arousing story...